What Daniel Radcliffe Wanted Most After Harry Potter

After spending over 10 years being the face of one of the biggest franchises on the planet, Daniel Radcliffe would've been excused for taking the rest of his twenties to chill out and spend his hard-earned Gringotts gold. Yet instead, just seven months after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2hit theaters, Radcliffe was starring in the horror fantasy The Woman in Black; shortly after that, he was filming the biopic Kill Your Darlings and a rom-com called The F Word. And in the years since then, Radcliffe has worked non-stop, taking on everything from heart-pounding thrillers to Broadway plays, all in an effort, he says, to show those who only knew him in his most famous role that he was far more than just the Boy Who Lived.

"For as many people as there are who go, 'OK, he’s typecast, that’s all he is now,' even if it’s — and I don’t believe it’s as high as they say — even if it's 50 percent of people, the other 50 percent are going, 'hey, let’s see how we can f*ck with expectations of him,'" Radcliffe tells Bustle, speaking during press for his latest film, the offbeat dramedy Swiss Army Man. "Things like doing Equus, or doing Kill Your Darlings, kind of set out my store a little bit in terms of letting people know that I want to do different, challenging stuff."

Swiss Army Man, in theaters now, might be Radcliffe's most unique project yet. Starring the actor as a talking, farting corpse who befriends Paul Dano's lonely castaway, the film is making waves for being one of the strangest, most interesting movies released so far in 2016 — exactly the type of film Radcliffe had in mind when Harry Potter came to an end.

"I knew I wanted to try and take on as diverse a range of opportunities as I could, but I just didn’t know if people would give me the opportunities," he says. "But I’ve been really lucky."

With a fast-growing resume, a new Off-Broadway play, and several major award nominations under his belt, Radcliffe's career couldn't be going better. Yet the actor says that there's still one role he hasn't yet taken on that's calling his name.

"I would love to be in a big — and I use this phrase very warmly — a big, sh*tty action movie," Radcliffe says, laughing. "Like a big disaster movie, a Roland Emmerich type thing, because I watch those films a lot, so that’d be one that I could take off the list."

Explosions, disasters and alien invasions — sounds like the perfect role for an actor game for any challenge.